


[Meta] How I make podfics

by Literarion



Category: None - Fandom
Genre: Meta, Other, Podfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-04 14:03:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21198860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Literarion/pseuds/Literarion
Summary: I've recently had a few people ask me how I make my podfics. I explained this on a Discord chat, and thought this might be useful for others, too, so I'm tidying up the transcript and publishing it here for reference. I'd like to say upfront that I've been doing this for all of three months, and most of what I do is stuff I learned on my own, and with the kind help of a few friends and some online guides. I'm glad if this is helpful for some, but I'd be equally glad for more experienced folks to givemesome hints to improve my own technique!





	[Meta] How I make podfics

### Selecting the right fic

Let me start at the beginning. Which is probably selecting a story to record. First of all, and this may seem obvious: Pick a story that you like. You're attaching your voice to this, I think that's a fairly personal relationship, and you wouldn't want to be associated with something on such a personal level that you can't stand behind. Some people record their own stories, some people avoid that - your choice. Whichever you record, unless it is your own, I think that you _need_ consent from the authors. I say 'I think' there, because there's lots of discussion among podfic'ers about whether this is the case or not. I think it is a grey area in copyright, but I'd rather be safe than sorry (or sued), and so I _always_ ask for consent, or check whether the author has a blanket consent in their profile, which many of them do. While some authors may not respond, I have never asked for permission to podfic and been turned down.

I started with simple things. Short fics, with not too many characters, not too much dialogue, and not too much explicit content. You should think about what you feel comfortable recording or not.

My list of criteria evolved quickly. I very much enjoy explicit content and dialogues now! But when you read you have visual cues for who says what, and you lose those when you read them out loud. So you need to make up your mind how you deal with that. I went with different voices from the start, and that seems to work (at least people seem to really like my Crowley-voice). I've also experimented with tone and speed (Adam Young is a quick talker when I do him), and plan to learn some accents next. When I select a fic I look at the characters involved, and how many there are. I only have a limited array of different tones and voices I can do, and recording something with ten characters that need to be audibly distinguishable is a real challenge.

I also avoid things that I know I can't pronounce. I'm not a native speaker, and I've spent _hours_ scouring YouTube to find out the correct pronunciation for things. Some were English terms that I simply wasn't familiar with. But I've also done two fics with individual sentences in Italian and Greek, neither of which I speak. Ultimately I figured that people who listen to English podfics probably won't speak those languages either, and what really counts is that they sound sufficiently foreign and that you get the tone right, rather than the exact words. "Thank you" will sound the same regardless which language you speak.

I hope that my native accent isn't too audible, because I personally cannot bear it, and I use podfics as a way to train myself to lose it even more. But generally, I don't think that accents matter much (unless of course you are trying to imitate them). So long as the speech is understandable, when you listen to something, you zone out the accent after a few minutes anyway. Or I do, at least. So it's much more important to be consistent. Don't start out avoiding an accent you have, if you can't keep avoiding it for the entire fic.

Another consideration is how long a fic is. It may be easier to start with fics that you can record in one go. My completed fics run at a speed of between 120 and 150 words per minute. The difference in speed comes from factors such as dialogue (the more the shorter, because they need less breaks), and paragraphs or scene changes, both of which need longer breaks. I divide the number of words by 135 for a rough estimate before I decide what to record. Fics that come in at around 30 minutes or less, I know I can do (record and edit) in one afternoon, and I often do that when I feel like publishing something while I work on much longer pieces. My second podfic was a story with 34k words - I would not necessarily recommend that.

Apart from length, characters and dialogue, I avoid fics with footnotes. Mainly because I had not figured out how to embed them, with the visual cues missing; you can't just add them at the end of a podfic! I've tried adding them into the main text with breaks around them and a different tone, but I am not yet convinced that I like the result.

Some people (or maybe most?) find it awkward to listen to their own voice in recordings. I realised that I've never had that with my podfics, which is probably because I've been listening to myself quite a lot: I'm a researcher, I regularly interview people and transcribe those recordings. These recordings were not something staged; it is a different kind of speaking, and maybe easier to get used to listening to yourself, if you want to get used to your own voice. Chances are you'll feel more comfortable listening to yourself doing something that doesn't need a specific cadence, at least to begin with.

### Preparing to record

Once you've selected a story, you should prepare it. I usually do that in Word. I highlight all the dialogues in the voices they need to be in. Highlighting helps because, when you're reading, the cue of 'who says what' often comes _after_ the speech, so you need a visual cue to give you direction upfront.

Here's an example from one of my podfics, 'Buzz Buzz'. Ignore the smut - check the highlights!

### Tech setup

Next, you need something to record with. I did my first podfics with a dictaphone. A decent one with a noise cancelling mic, with a small stand with a pop filter, but still a fairly analogue affair. By now I got myself a better mic with a stand and pop filter. I've got a [Neewer NW-7000](https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07DK89QZS/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1), which is fair value for money, but there are loads out there, and people much better qualified than me to make recommendations.

This is hooked up to my laptop, where I record directly in Audacity. There may be better software, but this is the one I know how to use, to some degree, so I stick with it. There's fairly obvious things around recording, like, you want to avoid background noise as much as you can. Set your phone to silent, close windows and doors. Lock the pets out. Wear headphones. I always take off any rings or jewellry, because otherwise they may clink when I move. 

Standing up when you record helps. You just get more out of your voice if you do. But I appreciate not everyone will have the equipment for that. Me, recording, looks something like this:

Test the microphone, recording volume, and the distance you should keep from your mic to have a decent recording. That may take some fiddling - I will link a guide I used at the bottom of this post that explains the intricacies better than I can.

I always record in a fresh track in Audacity. Before I start talking, I leave a nice long stretch of just background noise, maybe do the things I would do while recording: Type a few keys, drink something. You'll need that to remove background noise, which I'll explain later. I usually just leave about ten seconds at the beginning of every new track I record in.

_Save frequently_. Make backups. Because this is work, and you don't want to lose it! Audacity is fairly stable, but I had instances where it nearly crashed on me after a 90 minute recording, and I nearly died waiting for it to recover.

### Recording

At some point, you just have to hit 'Record' and go for it. Once you start recording, the most important part, I found, is _meaning it_. Don't make do with half measures. Speak with your normal voice at a normal volume, as you would in a regular conversation. If the characters whisper, whisper (but get closer to the mic, so it is audible). If the characters shout, shout (but get further away from the mic). If they are breathless, be breathless. If they moan, well, moan. I only record when I'm on my own. Apart from my others making noises, I couldn't slip into those roles when I feel observed.

I often don't nail a sentence on the first go. I'll start, and then realise halfway through I've used the wrong tone. Like a "What?" he whispered., and I already shouted the 'What'. So I do stuff over and over again. When I find that I made a mistake, I just go back and read the same sentence again. While you could go back into Audacity (or whatever you use), delete the mistake, and record fresh, I found that that's way too much clicking and fuss, and ultimately slows you down. So I just keep going, and if it takes ten tries to get it right, so be it. It becomes fairly easy after a while to tell from the sound profile where you've repeated stuff, so you don't even have to listen to all the tries. I do the same when I am unsure whether I have hit the right pitch, or tone: I just record the same line a few times in different ways. If I have been [clipping](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uEtworGLrU) \- essentially maxing out the waveform beyond 1db - I do the same. You can potentially fix this, but I find it a lot easier to just have a clean recording without it.

If at all possible, given the length, I record the whole fic in one go. The longer I keep going, and especially if I have longer breaks, I find it hard to find the same tone, pitch and cadence again. Which is a struggle, if you're mad like me, and record fics that have novel lengths. They're fun! Tremendously so! But they take _forever_, and it's really hard to keep it consistent.

If you find yourself tripping over because you speak too fast, all I can say is: Practice. Pace yourself. Preparing the document helps, because you've got to read over it quite carefully anyway. If you know it better, it gets easier, and you'll stumble less. And if you're unsure about pacing, mark where you want to breathe before you start recording.

### Editing

Next up is editing. I suppose there's many ways of doing this, and I've heard different people do different things. I'll talk you through what I do, and some of what I see, and you make a call on what you prefer.

I usually start by looking at the recording, visually, and see if there are any extraordinary spikes, like this, where Audacity even shows me where the recording is clipped:

I go over every instance where I have extraordinary peaks, listen over what they are, and in most cases, either delete them, or amend the volume for that specific part. That'll often be a single vowel where my voice went up, or something along those lines. It's okay to have louder and quieter bits, but you want to have some sort of consistency in volume. You probably know how annoying it is when you're listening to something, and suddenly the volume goes way up even though you haven't touched the controls? This is the same. I make sure that everything that stands out volume-wise is stuff that I want to stand out. That goes for both especially loud _and_ silent parts. Sometimes you want to whisper. But sometimes you were just too far away from the mic. In Audacity, you can regulate volume through Effect > Normalize, which works fairly intuitively.

Once I've sorted everything, I remove background noise. That's extremely easy in Audacity, which I think is why so many people use it. The command in Audacity is Effects > Noise Reduction. You use 'Get Noise Profile' first, from that stretch with background noise that you recorded in the beginning. Then you select all you want to apply it to, and go Effect > Repeat Last Effect / Noise Reduction. I do this separate for every track, because the background noises might change over time. Processing this takes a while, depending how long the track is, but Audacity usually gets out nearly all hums and hissing, and a good deal of breathing, too. Don't do this more than once though, as every time you apply the noise reduction, it also takes away a bit of your own voice - which is fine if you do it once, but you'll sound more and more tinny if you repeat it.

Once this basic preparation is done, I start cutting. Usually my recordings are about 50% longer than the final fic. That's because I leave longer breaks between sentences and paragraphs, take short breaks to drink something, and do - as described - repeats and repeats of some lines. I found that the longer I do this, the better I get at it, and while I started with recordings that may have been double the length of the final fic, I cut out much less now, only a few months in.

I go over the whole recording, second by second, and remove everything that doesn't belong. For me, that includes me breathing. I only leave that in during dialogues (as the character would breath while talking), or when it has a distinct purpose. For example, in 'left with no trace', if you count breaths, they should be audible! Different podfic'ers do this differently, but I prefer it this way.

I also add or adapt breaks. I use a rough give of half a second between sentences, one second between paragraphs; less between dialogues, more if I want to generate tension. Apart from the actual voice acting, I think the length of breaks is the most artistic element of making podfics. This is where you can steer how the story is heard, and much as I have an estimate length for everything, I will often break this because it intuitively feels like the story needs something else.

And I do all of this, for the entire recording. All of these editing steps works regardless whether you record directly in Audacity or not. If you just record on your phone and import an MP3, this will still work. As with final length, how long the editing takes depends on many factors, but I find that editing typically takes two to three times the duration of the recording. So, never believe that you're done just because you recorded it! That's the fun part. The real work starts after!

Once you're done, you can export your podfic (I usually do this track by track) to any format you like. I use MP3s, and make sure to include the source information - the author, a link to the text, my own name - in the metadata, like this:

### Publishing

Last you will want to think about hosting finished podfics. I tried Soundcloud, but found that it's too expensive for just a hobby, because it is paid by length, and if you record long fics, you very quickly need to invest very serious money to keep this going. I went with Anchor, because it's free, has unlimited storage, and an easy to use interface. Also, they do all the distribution for you. That's how I am on Spotify, which, only a few weeks in, has expanded my audience by about 50%! Anchor also gives you decent statistics about your audience, which nerds will appreciate.

I upload my podfics to Anchor, and create a corresponding post on AO3, where I keep all the information about the podfic, and any interactions with my audience.

### Resources

I have learned from [a great guide for improving sound quality](https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Improve-Vocal-Quality-in-Audacity/).  
I use [Freesound for samples and audio effects](https://freesound.org/).  
A colleague also recommended Forco for pronunciation, though I have not yet personally tried it.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to CompassRose for beta and useful tips!


End file.
